He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

-Friedrich Nietzsche

You want to serve in the Walking Dead? Let me warn you it's suicide missions, every last one of them, with no support and no way back out until we do whatever we have to do. And that means ten little troopers… nine little troopers… eight little troopers, until we're singing Glory be to God that there are no more of us, cause one of us could drink it all alone!

So, if any of you sorry bastards want a transfer out of 4th Division, just step this way…

-Master Sergeant Deis Mueller to replacements

"Oh my god…" Michiru breathed in shock as they surveyed the ruins around them.

They had teleported to the coordinates of the village address the old man had given Minobu, only to find it a blackened wreck. Charred corpses littered the streets, dried blood and gore in haphazard piles everywhere. There was a terrible stench in the air, and Michiru had to focus herself to avoid fainting. She looked over at Haruka, who was also holding her nose with one hand. She could see tears in Haruka's eyes, and her own vision was getting dimmed. She held a hand to her mouth, trying to hold back her emotions.

Minobu did not seem perturbed, as though this was nothing new to him. His face was rock hard, and utterly expressionless, but there was an aura of anger about him, a building rage that Michiru somehow knew was there. An urge to battle the parties responsible, to kill. His eyes were cold chips of steel.

"We have to look for survivors, and bring them to a safe location," said Haruka.

Minobu shook his head, "Don't bother. There won't be any survivors left here. From what I can see, this village town had a population of about a few hundred." He squatted down and placed a hand on the blood soaked ground, "The bad news is that I think more than half of them are dead. The good news is that the other half might still be alive."

"We'll need to find them." Michiru took a long look around.

"Yes, we will," Magnetite agreed. "Sainze can wait. I doubt the youma can kill him anyway. The strange thing is, I should be able to sense his presence this close, but there's nothing. Just a blank. Don't tell me…" Minobu's voice trailed off

"What is it?"

He shuddered, "Oh, nothing. Never mind. Anyway, we need to find those remaining villagers, as soon as we can, and bring them to somewhere safe." He started walking briskly down a street. "Follow me."

They left the small township, with Minobu inspecting the ground every few hundred meters. Michiru and Haruka followed him, trusting in his ability.

"Where did you learn to track like that?" Michiru asked him.

"Recon school. And experience is the best teacher." He smiled sadly.

"You were a soldier?" Haruka trudged alongside them, her sword held out and ready for sudden attacks by enemies.

"Yes, I was once a soldier." His eyes stayed on the trail. "And in some ways, I guess I'm still a soldier. Isn't that what the senshi are?"

"Yes, but we're more like protectors, guardians of the realm, than an organized military."

"True enough. I guess I was more like a professional soldier."

"What was your childhood like? I can remember the past, but the present you is so… different." Michiru said, trying to find out more about this man with so many secrets. He was so much like the Magnetite she remembered, but also so different in other ways. During the Silver Millennium, Magnetite had been a calm man, whose steadiness was like a pool to those around him. But this incarnation made the one she knew in the Silver Millennium to be putty in comparison. During the battle, he was so cold, so hard that it seemed like nothing could break him.

Minobu's eyes grew distant, "I grew up an orphan. My father was killed in battle, and my mother died of heartbreak. I spent my childhood being raised by my great grandfather. He was a stern man, very strict. When I was twelve, he sent me to a military academy to learn the arts of war."

Michiru was aghast, "What kind of person would do that to a child of 12 years old? I didn't know this sort of thing was allowed here."

He shrugged, "Where I come from, far, far away, as you would say, it's a bit different. My family is samurai, sworn to the defence of our nation. I was to be a samurai as well, following in the footsteps of my forebears. In any case, I've got no complaints. It was my destiny, my fate."

Magnetite turned towards her, "How about you? How was your childhood like?"

Michiru sighed. "I grew up in a rich family, but my parents never really seemed to love me. I was packed off to a boarding school as soon as I was old enough. They sent me money, but never anything else. Not letters, not even a phone call…"

Minobu reached for her hand, grasping it tight, "I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I found Haruka, I found my Princess, my true family." She was wistful, thinking of the difficult times she had as a senshi, before the rise of Crystal Tokyo. "I have everything I ever wanted, and I was happy. It was enough."

"Have you tried contacting them?"

"No, they didn't want to have anything to do with me. I guess I didn't want to have anything to do with them either."

He nodded, perhaps not quite understanding her situation, but certainly willing to accept her decision.

My turn. She asked, "So, what did you do as a soldier?"

So, what did you do as a soldier? Minobu was struck by her words, so simple and innocent in query, but raising the spectres of his past, one of his earliest memories of battle in his current life rushing unbidden back into his mind's eye…

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 "Chu-i Tetsuhara," the harsh voice of his superior officer, Tai-i Givens, rasped in Minobu's ear while he looked at the darkening sky, "Move your unit forward, get past the river, turn their right flank, and silence those heavy guns covering the bridgehead. I don't care how you do it. We need to seize the bridge in the next ten minutes, or we'll all be dead."

Bloody higher ups, thought Minobu, always asking for the impossible. "Sir, with all due respect, that will get me and my men killed."

"It's either die now or die later for us. You have your orders. Carry them out. Fulfil your duty as samurai."

"Yes sir," Minobu gritted his teeth, then switched off his headset. There was no other option, and he had his orders. He was samurai, and he would carry out his orders even if it was suicide. Especially if it was suicide.

It was nobody's fault that they were outnumbered. Nobody's fault that the enemy seemed impervious to losses unimaginable to any military force in human history. Nobody's fault that the aliens, who nobody had known existed prior to the massive invasion, had landed more than fifty thousand troops on this god-forsaken hellhole of an agricultural planet with no discernable resources, just to eliminate a few measly regiments of the DCMS militia garrison which did not number more than five thousand on a good day.

Minobu was just passing by in the Keihoku system, on leave from Sun Zhang and on his way back home for his great-grandfather's funeral on Awano when the enemy attacked from deep space. He had naturally been pressed into service to lead a hastily raised unit of barely trained recruits, only stiffened by a very meagre leavening of trained personnel. Then they had been sent into battle with barely adequate supplies and food.

The enemy had slaughtered the populace whenever they could find them, with artillery, airstrikes, and even a few antimatter bombs. The population of Keihoku had plummeted from about a hundred million to just 5 million scared survivors on the run from the enemy, and the garrison troops were hard pressed just to stay alive and defend their civilian charges at the same time.

If it would take the death of his company to break through enemy positions and allow the rest of the regiment to seize the bridge and link up with the rest of the forces on planet, then that was the way it had to be. Minobu had no illusions of the pressure that Givens was under, when he had to tell one of his subordinate commanders that he had just been murdered by the situation, and that Minobu and his men had to charge and die in a forlorn hope against overwhelming odds. Die as hard as they can in a hopeless cause.

The young officer raised his voice slightly to his command team of NCOs, crowding around him to hear his instructions, all of them older than he was, "Alright men, we're going to move past the river and hit their lines. We're going to turn their right flank, to allow the rest of the regiment time and space to seize the river bridge for our heavier units." He looked at the aghast soldiers, trying to inject a false confidence into his voice that he did not feel at all. "If we stay here, we die. We are not going to die. Speed is going to be essential, so tell the men that. Follow me once I jump, head for the far bank of the river, and stop for nobody. Go on." They scattered, transmitting the orders to their squads via hand signals and shouts.

There was nothing more left to say, except to fight and die. He waited till all the men could see him, then he jumped out of his trench, and started moving forward, in a quick loping run that would place him on the enemy flank. No need for smoke rounds to obscure their movement; as he had said, speed was essential if they were to stand any chance of getting across the shallow river bank. And they didn't have any smoke grenades, for that matter.

Almost immediately, he was met by a hail of gunfire. He did not look back to see if his men had followed him out of their trenches, their relatively safe, cosy trenches, but the shouts from behind him told him all he needed to know. It was a source of both gratification and terror. In his first campaign, he was already leading men to their deaths.

By the time he had reached the river, he was in shock at his own survival. His mind was on automatic, his rifle blazing away for all it was worth. His men straggled in beside him, their ranks thinned by enemy fire, but they doggedly followed him anyway. Trust was a heavy weight to bear, and the knowledge of sending good soldiers to die a heavier weight still.

He splashed into the water, the waist deep icy cold river chilling him to the bone. Minobu pushed forward sluggishly with all his strength, firing his rifle the whole time, while his men plunged in after him. They managed to get across the river banks, wading desperately across the shallow water and dragging themselves with agonizing difficulty out of the water onto the muddy, slippery ground, their soaked uniforms slowing them down, sometimes fatally. A few slipped on the mud, but they clambered forward, sometimes with a helping hand from a nearby friend.

Minobu saw several of his men get caught by a fusillade of machine gun fire. They fell to the ground in twitching heaps. He pulled his attention from them back to the battle. More men were crawling out of the river, firing their weapons in a vain effort to suppress the enemy. He found a small depression on the ground, and slid into it, avoiding the bulk of enemy fire for the time being. He could hear the screams from the wounded and injured who had been caught by the enemy fire as they laid on the river banks, even over the loud chatter of the guns. He shut away the noises. They were distracting him.

"Set up the mortars there!" He shouted, pointing to his sole remaining mortar team while one of his surviving heavy support teams had already dug into the hard ground, and unleashing the tremendous whine of the heavy laser cannon. The mortar team quickly slid into another mudhole blasted out by artillery shelling, and soon the dull thumps of mortar rounds were falling into the enemy positions. All along the river banks, his surviving soldiers had dug in, unwilling to advance any further. Minobu didn't blame them. They were only following his lead.

Somebody threw a grenade, and another point in the enemy line blew up in an explosion of black smoke. For the first time, Minobu had a slight inkling that he might just live through this debacle after all. The enemy was shooting at them, but didn't seem to be too accurate with their weapons, even if the air was so thick with rounds that he imagined even flies would have difficulty dodging. If only the amount of fire decreased by just a bit more…

"Gun-sho!" He shouted at one of his men, "Pull your squad and lope around 50 meters on the right. Flanking run, now!" He gestured with his arms as he spoke.

"Hai, Chu-i!" The Gun-sho, the equivalent of a sergeant in the DCMS, limped away, one leg trailing a line of blood on the ground as he sought to fulfil his orders. Four men followed him.

Minobu did not have the heart to tell the man that his flanking attack was only a diversion, and that his squad was a suicide decoy. The rest of his men were mostly huddled behind whatever cover they could find, or in holes made by the intense shelling of the night before.

"Company Roku, get ready for melee! Fix your bayonets!" Minobu drew his shabby katana from his scabbard, a cheap steel copy made by the dozens as makeshift symbols for hastily commissioned officers, hardly a blade worthy of a true samurai.

He was not surprised. After all, he hadn't even graduated yet from Sun Zhang, wasn't a real officer. Wasn't worthy of a genuine katana made by a master blade-smith. Just a cadet jumped up to a Chu-i's commission because they were fresh out of officers, and with the brigade commander on this world thinking that a boy with one or two years of academy training in a tactical command slot of cannon fodder with fewer scant weeks of basic training was better than nothing. Talk about the blind leading the blind and mute.

Minobu pushed away the doubt lurking in his mind. Would the troops follow him still? After all, a soldier's greatest fear was that when it came to the time of reckoning, his men would not follow his orders. They had already followed him so far. Would their nerve hold? Hell, would his own nerve hold? He looked around at the company.

The troopers' faces showed immense fear and strain from the losses they had endured, and more than one was sobbing brokenly at the death of friends and close comrades, but they put on their bayonets anyway. Relieved, Minobu stopped for a moment, panting hard, to try to gather his breath, his strength, for what was the final fight. He shut off all feeling, all emotion. He was a weapon, a tool, nothing more and nothing less. As were his men.

He raised his katana high, and almost immediately he felt the volume of fire heading their way shift away, which meant that the Gun-cho's attack was diverting their attention. That opening was all he needed. Their deaths could not be in vain.

Minobu stepped from his hole, and started running forward again. "Charge!" His thin line of men sprinted in after him, screaming and firing for all they were worth, working up their courage and last bits of strength for the melee battle. He fired the last of his ammo from the rifle in his left hand, an inaccurate burst that served its purpose of keeping the enemy's heads(or equivalents) down, and that proved enough for him to clamber over a low palisade and down into the enemy trenches and backfield area. There were swarms of the enemy milling around, about two whole companies, in fact, but he did not care as he fought his way forward.

The next few moments were flashes of incoherent fear, blood, and steel. He found himself facing off against an enemy Drakkar, its belt adorned with the fresh skulls of human children, its rank insignia identifying it as the enemy commander in charge of this part of the line. An enraged Minobu duelled with it, his cheap imitation katana snapping into two after a particularly brutal exchange. He grabbed up a broken-off bayonet tip from the ground and stabbed it in the chest just as it prepared to deliver the coup de grace. Wounded, the Drakkar dropped its sword, which Minobu snatched from the ground and swung up hard to decapitate it in one swift stroke.

Almost immediately, there was a slight shift, a rustling amongst the enemy monsters, as they realized that these doomed men, though outnumbered, were not going to die easily. Their own commander dead, they started to bend under the ferocity of Minobu's furious assault.

Then there was more gunfire, more screams, more blood. He could barely feel his own body as his sight became a swirling haze of clashing steel and crimson fog. He stabbed and cut and hacked with the Drakkar's heavy sword, fighting his way through throngs of enemies, each step bringing forth another opponent, another nightmare from the pits of hell. He could hear his own voice screaming with equal parts fear and anger as he fought, but it seemed as though it came from somebody else.

Then it was all over. A wild-eyed Minobu continued swinging away for several long moments before he realised there was no enemy left to fight, his pitifully few remaining men, not even a section left, hunched and panting and bleeding over their weapons and the dismembered forms of the bloatforms, the gnashers, the vordaks. Around them were several massive field guns, used to keep their heavy armour at bay. Minobu shuddered as he realized the enemy had been trying to reposition the guns to fire on his charging troops.

Heishi Gerald Akuma, a young soldier about his own age, dropped his own shattered rifle. His right arm hung limply at his side. Akuma walked around slowly, kneeling down every few steps to close the staring, vacant eyes of his dead friends, crying silently all the while, his own mouth open in shock, the tears washing a clear path down his mud and blood streaked face. Somebody sang a mournful funeral dirge for their dead, even as they watched the bridge finally fall to their own forces, the play of laser beams and heavy cannon tracers in the late evening seeming like a rock concert in more peaceful times.

Minobu was suddenly very aware of the intense pains all over his body, and especially his abdomen as his rage and fear ebbed away. He could taste blood diluted with saliva in his mouth, seeping out from between his bruised lips. And his left hand was held over his stomach, from some time back during the final charge, for some reason pinching the skin together. He lifted the bloody hand away from his bleeding stomach slowly.

His guts began to flow out from the open slit in his belly…

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He swallowed hard. "What I did as a soldier is not something I can easily explain. My experiences… have not been easy."

He had earned the coveted Bushido Blade for exemplary leadership and courage that day, the prestigious medal pinned unceremoniously onto the grimy, cut up, and certainly unpleasant uniform that served as his hospital garb as he laid swathed in bandages and duct tape to hold in his guts from spilling out, unconscious on a small cot in a crowded hospice along with dozens of wounded men, a place of death filled with the moans and cries of the dying. He had not even been 17 years old then, fighting for his own life in the hospice.

That had been his first real taste of battle. It would not be his last. In the end, he had far too much of it, more than any soldier had any right to. Crushing defeats, pyrrhic victories, enough for any number of lifetimes. Battles on freezing iceballs where even mere survival was a victory and any form of heat to be savoured. Or being on the wrong end of 1000 to 1 odds in searing deserts, slowly dying of thirst.

Shutting down his emotions except fear all the time because he dared not allow himself to feel, lest he broke down and stopped functioning as a soldier and leader of men, as he slowly ascended the ranks. Only his music and his art had kept him relatively sane.

And somehow being even marginally successful only made High Command throw him and his troops into more impossible situations. Take more than your fair share of objectives and you'll be given more than your fair share of objectives to take.

Along the way he had also discovered something about himself, and the knowledge had petrified him. Who he really was, what he was going to become, and what his fate was. The answer to the first question of 'who' was only slightly complicated by the revelation that he once was one of Endymion's generals. He wondered what Michiru would think if she knew his destiny.

"You had to be there to know how it felt like. To smell the blood in the air, the bitter taste of fear and defeat. Knowing that emotions were dangerous, that we were all dead men, sooner or later."

He saw her shudder at the bleakness in his voice, "I've seen too many good people, often far better than me, dead and gone. I've lived when I shouldn't, when I didn't deserve it." His eyes began to moist over. "My soul is scarred forever. I thought I could escape, at least for a little while, posing as a nobody in Crystal Tokyo, but I was just deluding myself. I am nothing but a killing machine." The tears finally fell from his eyes, but he did not notice them. "I never knew what I had lost until I had it back, even if it was for a little while…"

Why am I even pouring out my memories to her? He wondered. Minobu slowed down his pace to a halt, "And now, all I have is hate. And the object of my hate… is myself. In this world of love and peace, there is no place for me. Sooner or later, I will poison everything I care for. But I will do my duty. One way or another, I will send the King's enemies to hell, where they belong."

Sailor Neptune stopped him in his tracks, and brought a gloved hand up to wipe away the tears from his cheeks. Minobu brought his own hand up to his own face, and he seemed shocked at the tears. "I've not cried, since my parents died."

"Then cry, for your loss," said Michiru, who took him into her arms, "Let out all your sorrow. You don't have to bear them alone any more. You are not just an instrument of hate, you have love within yourself. You didn't save us at the palace just because of the oaths you took, you saved us because of your love."

She looked up, deep into his grey eyes, pleading, "This is a new beginning for you, for us. The past, your past, my past, made us what we are, but the choices ahead of us are our own. Please, don't forget the people who love you…"

They looked at each other, and Michiru wanted so much to kiss him, reassure him that everything was all right. Then Haruka coughed.

"Ahem, I think we had better get moving."

The two quickly disentangled themselves, their faces flushed. Haruka sighed. "We can talk all we want when we get back, but let's find the refugees first, shall we?"

"We might have found them already." Minobu suddenly started running. Then the two Sailor Soldiers saw it as well, a thin line of smoke rising in the distance above a hill in front.

The story right now revolves finding the rest of Minobu's friends and former comrades, scattered across the world. I have an idea of how this is going to end, but it'll take a while. The enemy is smart and powerful this time round, and there'll be worse on the way.

Reviews are definitely welcome!